Are the British people Europeans? This may seem a strange question to Africans and Asians, who tend to think of all white men as Europeans. But the British, when they are in Britain, do not regard themselves as Europeans. The Europeans, to them, are those rather excitable foreigners from the other side of the English Channel, who have never learnt how to speak English. Europe is 'the Continent': a place full of interest for British tourists, but also the source of almost all the wars in which Britain has ever been involved. Thus, although geographically speaking Britain is a part of Europe, yet the fact that it is a separate island that has made its people feel very, very insular. They feel, and in many ways are, different from the rest of Europe and they sometimes annoy continental nations by failing to support them, or even to understand them, in time of need. Where did the British people come from? This is an extraordinary interesting question, since they are a mixture of many different races, and all these races invaded Britain at various times from Europe. Nobody knows very much about Britain before the Romans came during the first century B. C. , but there had been at least three invasions before that. The first of these was by a dark-haired Mediterranean race called the Iberians. The other two were by Celtic tribes first the Gaels, whose descendants are the modern Scots and Irish, some of whom still speak the Gaelic language and secondly the Britons, who gave their name to the whole island of Britain. These were the people whom the Romans conquered. The Romans gave the Britons a good deal of their civilization, but they never settled in Britain in very large numbers, so the British race survived until the overthrow of the Ro man Empire by the 'barbarians', i. e. the numerous Germanic tribes which overran the whole of Western Europe. The purpose of the passage is to ______.